There’s a whole plethora of reasons a language might fall in or out of favour. From ecosystem lock in (eg Objective-C was mandatory for Apple development prior to swift and Visual Basic was ostensibly killed by Microsoft during the dot net upsell) to fragmentation in the community (eg Perl vs Raku). These don’t mean the languages aren’t “fun” nor productive.
Likewise, “fun” is such a subjective term that it’s utterly meaningless using it as any kind of yardstick. Esoteric languages are arguably the most “fun” but you don’t see companies running critical infrastructure on Brainfuck, Rockstar, nor lolcode.
And to say Pascal, Perl and Objective-C were false starts only demonstrates the author hasn’t used any computers prior to 2010. Perl was the de facto sysadmin language for literally decades. Pascal was the microcomputer language of choice before C++ took over (even to the extent that some 80s OSs are Pascal projects), Objective-C only disappeared because Apple introduced Swift. And the authors comment about COBOL being retired is untrue for anyone who’s worked on critical banking software.
I honestly think AI slop would have more value than this naive opinion piece.